“Ogden had little interest in the old woman when she’d been alive, so he was amused at how much her death was affecting him. Perhaps it was as simple as a mystery to pass the time in a boring, sleepy village. Maybe it was some kind of sublimation for a stalled life, a life he was not pursuing. Or perhaps he just wanted to catch and stop a killer.”
It’s interesting to see what gets repeated, and how intentional or inadvertent that repetition is. There’s Ogden Walker’s repeated assertion of the uselessness of fingerprint and forensic evidence. There’s his occasional protest that he’s no more than a small-town sheriff’s deputy, not a detective, just fit for issuing speeding tickets rather than solving mysteries. And then there’s this:
“Ogden could feel his heart racing and he wondered why and realized the answer was obvious. Nothing makes people more interesting than their being dead. Sad, but true. He really didn’t want to see dead people. It made him feel queasy to see dead people, but damn if it wasn’t interesting. The sky was so blue it was almost ironic.”
For the second time in a handful of pages, excitement over, and interest in, the rare (although growing less rare, at least in his corner of New Mexico) dead person.
Graywolf 10.25.11
October 29, 2011, 11:00am Comments
